Nina Simone Played Through It

Before she was Nina Simone, she was Eunice Kathleen Waymon, the sixth of seven children in a house in Tryon, North Carolina, where — as she later put it — everything that happened involved music.

She was trained to be a concert pianist. That was the plan: Bach, recital halls, a life in classical music. It ended early, when the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia rejected her. For years she believed she simply had not been good enough. Only later did she understand the rejection for what it was. She was Black, and that door was not going to open for her.

So she took the work that was available. To keep a job playing piano in an Atlantic City bar, she was told she would have to sing. She did, and Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone.

It is worth noticing that the thing which made her a legend was a compromise she made in order to survive. That is a pattern in this history. The world closes the door you wanted, and the work you make instead is the work that outlives everyone.

Then the 1960s arrived. After the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, which killed four girls, and the murder of Medgar Evers, she wrote “Mississippi Goddam” — a song so direct that radio stations refused to play it. It was not subtle, and she did not want it to be.

What gets discussed far less is what all of it cost her. Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the late 1980s. Biographers have noted that she was taking medication from the mid-1960s onward, and that only a small circle of people close to her knew. In her 1991 autobiography, “I Put a Spell on You,” she wrote about the breakdowns, and about surviving a suicide attempt.

Read that next to the career and the shape of the thing starts to appear. She was celebrated for the intensity. That same intensity was treated as a personal failing. For decades she was described as difficult, by people who were profiting from precisely the quality they complained about.

She left the United States in the 1970s and effectively never came back — Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and finally France, where she died in 2003.

The honest version of a life like hers is not the tortured genius story. That framing flatters the audience. It says the suffering was the price of the art, as though the two could not be separated, which conveniently lets us admire the output while doing nothing about the conditions that produced the pain. Her illness was not her talent. It was something she carried while she worked. It was treatable. She was treated for it. And she kept working.

She played through it. The lesson is not that suffering makes art. It is that people make art while suffering, and that this would be a great deal easier if we made room for artists to be unwell and still be working.

If you are struggling, help is available. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any time. You can also text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line.